Heart to Heart
by Don't Believe a Word
Summary: Mark and Roger have a little chat regarding certain personal problems, and Maureen makes things worse. Some canon, slight Roger Mark stuff going on, and excessive Mark embarrassment. Rated R just to be safe.
1. Chapter 1

**Title:** Heart to Heart

**Author's Notes:** I live. Surprise, surprise. I know that I promised a Roger/Mark thing about three months ago, but quite frankly, and this is everyone's excuse, school has me whipped. Math is killing me. This is just a little piece, the spawn of a wonderful night of sheer brilliance. Many thanks to GayApparel, I Heart Scrawny Jewish Boys, and Kellie, who may or may not have a username here, for encouraging the madness.

* * *

"Roger?" 

Immediately on setting foot over the threshold of his home, Roger could tell that something was amiss. He stood in the doorway for quite a long moment, staring in like a deer in the headlights, pondering and wondering, turning about in his rather hollow head the consequences that would come to haunt him if he turned tail and fled versus those that would come to haunt him if he entered into the calm sort of chaos that was the loft.

"Mark?"

The whole place was, to use the term lightly, spotless. Not only could Roger see the floor, but it was shiny. As shiny as it could be, considering the years of scuffs and scratches that permanently marred the generally not-so illustrious hardwood. The shifting dunes of manuscript paper and pages torn from yellow legal pads, the books and pens and picks that tended to line the floor, all of them had been swept up and organized, placed into neon yellow and orange milk crates, conveniently labeled with names. (Roger himself, he noticed, had two crates, both orange, full of loose papers, stacked neatly one on top of the other.) The lofty windows had been cleaned up to a certain point, to the height where a small person could reach no higher while safely standing atop a card table or folding chair, and the setting autumn sun cast a rather warm glow over the too-clean-to-be-inhabited-by-Roger apartment.

"Dude, what happened?" the stupefied guitarist breathed, wandering mindlessly in with saucer-sized eyes and a half-open mouth. "W-what--? Are... are your parents coming over or something? Is it safe to wear pajamas?" Roger's pajamas, of course, consisted of nothing but his underwear, and so it was never safe to wear pajamas.

"No," Mark replied, quietly at that, from where he sat huddled on the couch, his chin on his knees. "They're not coming over."

Breathing a genuine sigh of relief, Roger kicked off his shoes, shucked his pants, and wasted no time in overturning the meticulously organized crates of belongings in order to distribute their contents unevenly across the floor from whence they came. "Thank God."

Mark, for his part, seemed to droop a bit, be it from watching as Roger destroyed his afternoon's work or watching as Roger destroyed his afternoon's work while shamelessly slinking about in his -plaid, of course- boxer shorts. Sighing lightly, he pressed his thumb and forefinger gently against his eyes, listening absently as Roger shuffled through a sea of junk.

"So...if your mom's not coming over, why's everything so clean? It's making my head spin."

Mark, of course, like the good little borderline obsessive-compulsive boy he was, cleaned when he was nervous. The approach of his parents naturally made him anxious, which would have explained the waxed and polished and dusted and shined flat, but as this wasn't the case, Roger was quite puzzled by his friend's habit.

"I mean, come on man," he said, crossing the room in the direction of the windows and running his thumb down the length of one pane of glass, scoffing when it came up free of grime. "This should be filthy. You're fucking with my feng shui."

Mark, who normally would have enjoyed such a comment, especially since he was sure that Roger knew nothing about decorating, merely buried his head a bit further into his knees and hugged his arms tighter around his legs. Around this time, Roger started to notice things besides the dazzling cleanliness that was threatening to suffocate him.

"Hey...Hey, Mark. What's wrong?" he asked, just about as lightly as was possible with Roger, as he casually knocked a too-straight stack of books to the floor on his route towards the couch. "You look like someone ate a small portion of your soul, threw it back up, rubbed it through your h--"

"Roger, can I talk to you about something?"

Blinking once, the musician shrugged his shoulders before flopping down onto the couch, making Mark bounce a bit on the other end and eliciting a terrible groan from the old springs. "Yeah, sure thing. What do you want to talk about?"

The miserable looking boy on the other end of the couch seemed to shrink into himself, purposely avoiding Roger's eyes by staring down at the tops of his shoelaces. He twiddled his thumbs and wrung out his hands, tugging on each of his fingers and listening for the soft 'pop' of each knuckle cracking. He looked around, up at the rafters, down at his shoes, out into his perfectly clean little wonderland, and then banged his forehead into his knees, much to his friend's confused stare.

"Mark... is this going to be one of those stories where I have to fill in the blanks? Because I'm really not good at those, and I'm really fucking hungry, so if it's going to take a while... can I at least make a sandwi--"

"Roger, do you and April have sex?"

Roger wasn't sure if his jaw dropped because the ever-polite Mark Cohen had just interrupted him twice in as many minutes or because the ever-bashful Mark Cohen had just said the word 'sex' without bleeding profusely from the nose. He hesitated a moment, feeling a strange knotting in his chest, not unlike that feeling felt by parents on giving their preadolescent children 'The Talk,' carefully thinking on how to put what he wanted to say gently and tastefully.

"No, Mark. No, we don't. That 'Uugh...fuck...Roger, faster...please...oh God, yes...uhh...harder...' thing is our secret code for, 'How are you doing tonight, dear? Are you well?'" So much for tasteful.

Mark, who had blushed a brilliant shade of scarlet at Roger's imitation of his rather vocal girlfriend, flattened his hands to the top of his head and peered out at Roger from over his knees, his glasses practically fogging up from the heat of his face.

"Th-that's not what I mea--"

"Well, that's what you said. You said, 'Roger, do you and April have sex?'" The smirking guitarist exaggerated Mark's uneasy stammer and briefly mocked his posture, much to the glowing of his friend's face. "What did you mean? 'Roger, do you and April have wild, hot, earth-shatteri--"

"Do... do you _always_ have sex? I-I mean..." Letting his thought die, a very pink-in-the-cheeks Mark sighed, defeated, and made a very general gesture with his hands, one which could have been interpreted to mean just about anything.

Roger leaned back into the arm of the couch and scratched the back of his head a bit, trying to judge by Mark's posture just what he meant by 'always.' He and April, while not exactly attached at the crotch, spent quite a bit of 'quality time' together, and the loft's thin and makeshift partitions did little to hide that little fact. Then again, perhaps Mark was asking if they physically were always having sex, if they thought about sex when they weren't together and had sex when they were (Roger was guilty); Mark had a nasty tendency to take things too literally.

Correcting Mark's vague sweep of the hands by moving his right index finger in and out of his left fist, Roger grinned a bit and shrugged his shoulders. "What do you mean? You've _got_ to know when we do, so if you just take that away from all the times when we _don't_, you've got your answer."

"Do you..." The bespectacled youth seemed to consider this for a moment, then shook his head into his knees when he realized that it hadn't been the answer he had been looking for, as he hadn't asked the question he wanted to ask. "I-- do you... when you want to, _do_ you?"

"Is Maureen using you?" Roger's face darkened a bit, and not with the blood in the cheeks that was customary of Mark. "Because if she is, that bitch is going down. Nobody fucks with my little Marky."

From his modified fetal position, Mark groaned and held the top of his head in his hands.

"Oh..." Roger blinked, stroking his quick-growing stubble. "Oh... Nobody _does_ fuck with m--"

"C-could you please just... just answer? Please, Roger?" There was a sort of desperation to Mark's voice, enough that Roger could, for once, focus on only the issue at hand: his friend cowering on the other end of the couch.

"Well... yeah, I guess I do, Mark. I mean, if April's being a real bitch, she'll sometimes tell me to just go fuck _myself_, but usually... yeah, we do." On seeing Mark's shoulders sag even further, Roger heaved an exasperated sigh and willed himself to shut up, thus forcing the boy into doing less of the questioning and more of the talking. "Why?"

"Y-you never... can't?" How unlike the little photographer-slash-writer, to use a double negative. "W-what I mean is... you always do? If you-- if you want to, and she wants to, _can_ you? Always? Y-you never, uhm... run into a... any sort of a...problem?" Mark's voice simultaneously grew higher and quieter, ending in what was little more than a whispered squeak, which complimented quite nicely his scarlet face.

"Dude. Mark." Roger laughed a bit, nearly unbelieving, and rested the back of his head against the couch. "Is this about condoms?"

Oh, how Mark wished it were about condoms. "No..."

"Then what's it about? Come on. What the Hell are you talking about, then?"

"I can't have sex," Mark blurted out, immediately reddening and hiding his face in his hands. "I can't do it."

To Roger, this made very little sense; while Mark certainly wasn't the sexual fiend that he was, Maureen was quite persuasive and quite horny, and Roger knew damn well that there was no possible way in which Mark could resist her, especially once she had one hand already in his pants. Besides, he could still vividly remember the morning that Mark had refused to leave his room, out of shame of what his roommates would say when they realized that he had been quite noisily 'de-virginized,' as he had put it.

"Sure you can," he reasoned, furrowing his brow a bit. "Yeah, you definitely can. Just the other night, I know that I heard--"

"I can't," Mark whimpered into his hands. "Not now."

"Well, of course you can't now; Maureen isn't even here."

"She went out," the troubled boy sighed. "She's so mad at me, Roger. She went out _because_ she's mad at me."

"Mark, you're not making sense. Maureen goes out all the time, even when she's not mad at you; you know how much she shops. Why even worry?"

"She's _mad_, Roger," Mark groaned. "I don't think I've ever seen her so frustrated, and I know that she says she's not mad at me, but she is. I know she is, because it's my fault, whatever's wrong."

Ever the problem-solver, Roger waved a hand dismissively and shrugged his shoulders. "I suggest make-up sex," he offered. "Believe me: Maureen will forget everything."

"You don't get it: there is no make-up sex. There _can't_ be make-up sex, because there can't be any sex at all," the pathetic photographer whimpered, hugging his knees up even closer to his chest. "There's something wrong with me, Roger."

"No sex?" The enormity of the situation was beginning to reveal itself to Roger, who suddenly seemed quite a bit more interested. "Wait, why? Are you pulling that scared virgin thing again?"

The blonde boy pouted a bit, not entirely thrilled by Roger's view of his cautious approach to sex. "No."

"Well, what's up, then?"

Mark hesitated a long moment, before punning weakly. "Well... not me."

"What do you mean?" Roger was not good with puns, and his initial ignorance to the play on words made it even more difficult for Mark to say what needed to be said.

"I'm not… up," he repeated quietly, mumbling into his knees and blushing furiously all the way into the tips of his ears. "It just won't… I think there's something wrong…"

With a grace period of five or ten seconds, the double-entendre gradually became clear to Roger, who stared shell-shocked at Mark, mentally strangling himself so as to repress a laugh that was sure to slip if he wasn't careful. "So… you can't—" Crudely demonstrating with his arm, the indiscreet musician chuckled slightly as Mark nodded his head, earning him a horrified look from the boy across the couch.

"I-it's not funny!" he cried, hugging his arms around his chest and staring up at Roger with pain in his eyes and shame written all across his face. "I thought you'd understand!"

"Mark," Roger sniggered, stroking his chin in a vain attempt to keep himself from laughing. "How would I understand? I've never had E-" At the sight of just how pathetic Mark looked, Roger heaved a sigh and lazily got to his feet, moving over to Mark's end of the couch and squishing the smaller of the two of them into the back to allow himself room to squeeze in next to him. "You really can't do it?"

"No." Mark tipped his head back and groaned, anxious and frustrated in more ways than one. "And Maureen… she's going to go if I can't… you know…"

"Well… maybe it's not Maureen you want," Roger suggested, slowly slipping an arm around his friend's waist and leaning in close to him. "Maybe… maybe you've been looking in the wrong place this whole time, Mark." With that said, Roger planted his hand quite firmly against Mark's crotch, eliciting a squeak from the blushing blonde. "Maybe Maureen's not doing it for you because you'd much rather be with… someone like me." Groping quite casually, Roger stared into Mark's eyes, which were more shocked than half-lidded with pleasure. He continued to fool around only until it was obvious that he was earning no sort of reaction from Mark, who was staring, wide-eyed, right up at him. "Or… Okay. Maybe not."

"Er… Roger, could you…" Nodding down towards his pants, a very scarlet Mark gestured for Roger to remove his hand, which still rested below his belt.

"Oh, yeah. Sorry about that."

A very long, very awkward period of silence followed, while Mark lamented his personal problem and Roger bemoaned the fact that his generally magic touch hadn't been able to do anything for his suddenly impotent friend. Was Mark blind or something? Was he really incapable of being attracted to the man who was, quite possibly, the most attractive person in New York, nay, in the world?

"Hey," Roger finally said, stretching and pulling himself off the couch, scratching as he often did, "Wait right here, okay? I've got a plan."

While Mark was normally a sensible enough boy to know that a Roger plan was bad news, he was far too miserable over his little issue to care much, so he watched Roger head up to their lofty rooms with a hopeless expression, sighing and groaning and just generally being a despondent little mess.

Roger, for his part, set about collecting anything in his room that could possibly assist Mark with a little bit of self-help: magazines, for Roger had plenty, a pair of handcuffs, scarves, a few condoms, just in case, and other various little tools. On a second thought, he threw into his weighty box of things a few of Collins' magazines, too. Just in case everyone's suspicions about Mark turned out to be true. When he felt that he had gathered enough to put his plan into action, the very self-assured rocker made his way back downstairs and into the kitchen, carelessly shoving his box into their tiny bathroom, slicking back his hair, and calling to Mark.

"Okay, you can come see now!"

Heaving a sigh, Mark slinked off the couch and in to Roger, looking lamely up at him with a, 'Well-what-now?' expression once he was standing in front of him.

"Mark," Roger whispered, putting a hand on his friend's shoulder and slowly moving in closer to him. "Mark, Mark, Mark…"

But in one fluid motion, Roger swept a much smaller Mark to one side and through the bathroom door, which he immediately pulled shut and barricaded, much to his roommate's cries of protest.

"You're really sick, you know?" the boy called, banging on the other side of the door with his fists balled. "Roger, come on! Let me out!"

"Nope!" Roger called back, taking a seat at the kitchen table and kicking his feet up. "Not until you're finished."

Mark made an incredulous little noise as he daintily picked up what looked like a pair of little black clothespins. "Well… what do—what am I supposed to finish?"

"Oh, you'll figure it out."

"Roger, this is so…"

"Ah-ah. You're wasting time, Marky."

Groaning audibly, Mark reluctantly took a seat on the ledge of the bathtub, sifting through Roger's box of things with an expression crossed between repulsion and terror. Roger, naturally, was quite pleased with his brilliant idea and rewarded himself with a handful of Cap'n Crunch. While he was munching away, the phone began to ring. This didn't mean, of course, that he was going to pick it up, unless it was someone really good calling; if he went to answer it, he might miss something with Mark.

"Mark," the answering machine finally whined, "This is your mother calling. I'm not sure if you remember me, dear, but we remember you, and we were just calling to wish you a happy start to the Holy Days, Mark, and a happy Rosh Hashanah. Sweetheart, we really wish that you would come home and celebrate with us. We miss y-"

Scoffing, Roger crossed to the phone and picked it up, but only to set it back down again, successfully cutting Mark's ever-worried mother off, letting her speak to a dead line for all he cared. For the moment, he had much better things to do than listen to Mrs. Cohen ramble on and on about some holiday. Not that Mark would care, anyway.

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**Author's Notes:** So, what think you? Review, and there may just be more to come. There's always more room for Roger and Mark awkwardness. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Author's Notes**: Thank you so, so much to everyone who reviewed. Knowing that people like this nutty idea makes my day. Still…I can't believe I would even think of something like this… Oy.

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"Roger, please..."

"Nope."

Nine o'clock found Mark on his knees on the bathroom floor, his forehead pressed against the back of the door and his wiry hands quivering out of mild stir-craziness. In a desperate attempt to free himself, the poor boy had given into Roger's demands and sifted through his box of things, trying his best to entertain the ideas that he was supposed to have on seeing naked women winking at him and failing miserably. Not even so much as a twitch.

"It's not going to work," he had said, angrily at first, then consistently more pathetically as it repeated.

"You're not trying hard enough," Roger had insisted.

And so a very forlorn Mark had grudgingly consented to go through Roger's things, wishing all the time for disinfectant or for rubber gloves as all manner of indecent, so-called 'toys' passed through his hands, occasionally gasping and letting some of the more unsettling objects fall to the floor. Roger, each and every time he heard a whimper or a gasp from the other side of the door, had pressed his ear close and listened, waiting for more, but generally hearing nothing but muffled swears and exclamations of utter disgust.

At one point, about two hours in to his imprisonment, Mark had resorted to physical violence in an attempted escape; setting the box aside, he had placed his glasses down on the ledge of the bathtub and out of harm's way before taking a running start and throwing himself, left side first, into the door. He had howled, naturally, on finding the door much more solid than he had hoped it would be, due to Roger's weight leaned up against the other side, but had repeated his assault, not only once more, but twice and again, hoping that the wood would crack or a hinge would give under his slight force.

"Nice try, Marky," Roger had snorted after the third attempt, hearing Mark groan in pain from the other side. "But that only works if you're blessed with the physique of a Greek god, like certain people we know."

After three hours of failure, of unfortunate disappointment, and of misery on Mark's part and glee on Roger's, the troubled boy fell into silence, stared at the back of the door much like Pete Townshend's pinball-playing hero stared at a mirror, and refused to speak a word or acknowledge Roger's chides.

"What's going on, Mark?" the smug musician called, tapping thrice on his side of the door. "Find something you like?"

When he got no reply, Roger knocked again, knitting his brow in trying to figure his friend out. "Busy? Can I go now?"

When there was no voiced response, but rather the sound of running water, Roger began to grow a bit anxious. "Hey... come on, Mark. Give me a sign or something."

The rush of running water was soon accompanied by the swish of clothing on clothing, the various onomatopoeia caused by the dropping, tossing, and throwing of assorted objects into a plastic crate, and even, when Roger listened close enough, the low, suppressed giggle of a mad person. Such foreign noises continued for a matter of a minute or two, before one knock from Mark's side of the door startled Roger onto his feet.

"Mark?"

But the voice on the bathroom side of the door did not belong to sweet little Mark. It was at the same time high and guttural and soft, throaty and trembling and strained.

"Your porn dies tonight."

With a shriek that would have been comical had the situation not been so dire, Roger leapt for the door and immediately tore down his makeshift barricade, tossing chairs aside and fumbling with the doorknob until the door swung open towards him, revealing to his frightened eyes what was quite possibly the most grisly scene he had ever had the displeasure of viewing.

Mark Cohen, gentle little Mark who fed stray cats and couldn't even crush bugs, who watched the moon and the stars if he could see them through the smog, who blushed almost without a catalyst, and who was puppet to his mother, under three hours of confinement had finally snapped. He stood beside the steadily filling bathtub, shirtless and shoeless, with a silk scarf wrapped around his head as a headband and his glasses crooked across his nose. He had painted himself in edible colors, in strawberry red and apple green, in non-toxic war paints that were normally used to enhance intimate experiences, all across his face and chest and twiggy arms. More importantly, though, and more frightening than the_ Lord of the Flies_-turned boy was his position, resolute for once, with Roger's heavy crate of magazines and toys straining his arms as he held it over the threatening water in the tub.

"It's going to be a bloodbath." The boy's lips curled into a sinister little smirk as he slowly turned from Roger to the crate in his hands. "Any last words?"

"M-Mark--" Roger, from his place in the doorway, was sweating bullets and trying desperately to voice a coherent and acceptable reason as to why Mark shouldn't have dumped his supply of _Playboy_ into the steaming bathwater. "Let's not... do anything we're going to regret, now... C-come on, pal... you... you don't really want to do this..."

"No?"

"No... you... you're just going to calm down and step away from the water, okay? Okay, Mark? And you're going to give that crate to me, and we can just forget that any of this happened."

Mark, with his light eyes narrowed and his jaw set, looked far from convinced.

"Seriously, man, come on... W-we can go out for dinner or something, or-- oh, I know: we can see a movie. One of those artsy movies that you like. Just you and me, okay? Just you and me; nothing to worry about, no Maureen--"

"Maureen..." Mark's expression softened dramatically; his lip quivered and his eyes began to water while his shoulders slumped .

"Yeah, yeah! Okay, no, fine! Maureen can come. She can come, it's okay," Roger added hastily, taking a cautious two steps towards his suddenly whimpering friend. "Okay? Good?"

In the meantime, though, Mark had started to tremble so terribly that the magazine atop the pile slowly slid, inch by inch, slipping down past the rest of the pile and finally plummeting into the tub with a heartbreaking splash. Roger cringed and whimpered audibly as the noise rattled Mark, who peered over into the water.

"February 1992," he read flatly, slowly lowering himself to sit on the rim of the tub, crate in his lap. "Fare thee well."

"February '92?" Roger exclaimed, rushing over towards the tub and swiftly fishing out the waterlogged magazine. "That's the one that looks like April, you little ass! I could kill you!" Attempting to dry the ruined pages out in his shirt, Roger flopped down beside his morose friend, caught halfway between mourning and rage. "I could kill you," he repeated through clenched teeth, surveying the damage with a frustrated sigh. "If you weren't so pathetic-looking, I'd bash your head in."

And indeed, Mark was looking quite pathetic, in contrast to his savage-boy appearance of two minutes earlier. The mention of Maureen, it seemed, had triggered in him a terrible sense of sorrow that was only compounded by the facts that Roger was angry with him and that Maureen may or may not have ever been coming back to him. He rested his head in his hands and his elbows on his knees while Roger cautiously put a hand on his back, breathing deeply as he tried to comfort his miserable friend rather than beat the living Hell out of him.

"Come on, Mark," Roger sighed, slinging an arm around his shoulders and mussing up his hair. "It's no big deal." What a liar. Out of all the ones he could have dropped, why did it have to be _that_ one, damnit? "You're being way too... too hard on yourself." There was a beat, and Roger bit into his lower lip, trying terribly to stifle laughter but failing miserably, bursting out into a fit of subdued hysterics as Mark eyed him gloomily.

"What?" the strawberry and apple-flavored boy groaned, turning his head out of his hand and towards Roger.

"I s-said... I-I-" Roger, evidently, by the way he was gasping for breath between bouts of laughter, had either found something amazing funny or had somehow passed into one of those 'I'm high on life' phases through which the musician so often passed. "'Being too h-hard on... hard on.. and you-you can't even--" Sighing, the extremely immature Roger chuckled and wiped at his eyes, which were brimming with tears of laughter. "Oh, man..."

Mark, on the other hand, was far less amused and let Roger know so by shoving his weight into his rather jocular friend, sending Roger, much to Mark's surprise, backwards into the tub. While this would have been sweet revenge in another circumstance, Roger, having been so close to Mark, had taken a hold of the boy's shirt and pulled him down with him, successfully soaking his attacker amidst a stream of curses and shouts from both parties.

"Shit, Mark," Roger growled on surfacing, scowling and very red in the face, "You get fucking testy when you're not getting any."

Mark, who was, by this point, dripping with edible body paint, heaved a frustrated sigh and splashed Roger directly in the face with the rather hot water, much to the howling and swearing of his friend. "I am _not_ tes--" But the rest of the word came out only as an airy squeak, as Mark's eyes widened drastically and his voice got caught in his throat, holding breath down with it. As he had been atop Roger, you see, and Roger had been struggling and thrashing about, having very recently been assaulted with a wave of hot water, Mark had found himself on the very, very wrong end of one of Roger's knees, which had struck him swiftly and with enough force to shut him up and double him over into the water, wheezing and gasping for breath.

"Lousy little mother-fucking son of a bastard," Roger growled, pulling himself out from under Mark and hoisting his victim out after him, setting him down on the tile floor in favor of cradling his absolutely ruined _Playboy_, which had fallen into the tub with them. "Serves you right."

"Serves who rig-- oh."

Naturally, right as Mark was holding himself beneath a very wet, very pissed-off Roger, Maureen had made her unusually lackluster entrance, had appeared in the doorway and had blinked twice, gawking at the strange-even-for-their-loft scene before her.

"Did I... interrupt something, Roger?" she asked, slowly making her way over to the drowned rats more commonly known as Roger and Mark , carting with her two or three nondescript paper bags. She added, on second thought, once she noticed the rather strained expression on her boyfriend's face, "Is he gonna be okay?"

"Not that I care," mumbled Roger gruffly, gathering up the rest of his things and making his way towards the door, "But he'll be fine. In like... two hours, but he'll get over it." Just as he was about to step back into the kitchen, a suddenly smug-looking Roger turned back over his heel and smirked at Maureen, who had since bent down to get a better look at Mark. "Just rub it for him, and it'll work itself out."

"F-fuck you..." Mark wheezed, blushing horribly when he opened one eye and found only Maureen smiling down at him, looking significantly less frustrated than she had been when she had gone out earlier that morning. "O-oh... Maureen... hi..."

"Hi there, Marky," she returned, leaning in a bit more to give him a peck on the cheek. "Mm, strawberry."

"L-listen, Maureen--" Mark started, struggling to pull himself up into a sitting position. "I'm rea--"

"No, Pookie. It's really okay," Maureen giggled, taking his hands into her perfectly-manicured fingers and helping him the rest of the way up. "I'm the one who should be sorry. I flipped out this morning, and... well, maybe I was overreacting a little bit." Smiling, Queen Maureen walked her fingers slowly up a very flushed Mark's arm and to the back of his neck, where she pulled gently at his wet hair. "I think I know how to make it better, though," she added, leaning in to playfully kiss the tip of his nose. "It makes perfect sense."

"Maureen, you're wonderful," Mark sighed, turning a bit to kiss her cheek and trying to ignore the terribly pain in his lower abdomen.

"I know," she giggled, running her fingers back through the boy's hair and watching it spike up behind them. "I'm wonderful and brilliant."

"And that's why I love you."

"And here I thought you loved me because I have a drop-dead sexy body."

"Oh, well--" Mark blushed furiously and grinned his sideways smile, much to Maureen's delight. "Well, there's that, too..." Gently worrying his lower lip, the boy slipped away from his wonderful, brilliant, drop-dead sexy girlfriend and wrung some of the water out of his shirt. "But... what's your idea, exactly?"

"I thought you'd never ask!" Maureen exclaimed, still beaming as she stood to her feet and gave Mark a hand up. "The answer's right here." She gestured to one of the bags she had carried in, but pulled it away sharply when Mark tried to peer into it. "Nuh-uh. You have to come upstairs, first," the diva queen teased, smiling sexily and taking Mark's hand into her free one. "Coming?"

'I hope so,' Mark's inner voice -which, incidentally, sounded quite a bit like Roger- whispered as the boy nodded and followed like a puppy on a leash, trailing just an arm's length behind Maureen all the way up to their bedroom.

Luckily for Mark, it was quite black upstairs, as the bedrooms were quite inadequately lit, and the room that Mark and Maureen often shared with Roger and April happened to be without a skylight. The cover of darkness allowed him to shuck his wet clothes without the constant fear he had of Maureen seeing him naked getting the better of him, but on her request, he didn't get into his pajamas, opting instead to sit on their mattress with the sheets wrapped around him while Maureen got herself situated somewhere out in the darkness.

"No peeking," the self-named post-modern goddess giggled, shuffling about with whatever she had in her bag.

"How much longer?" Mark whimpered, finding that the longer he had to wait, the less bold he was when it finally came time for Maureen to kick things off. "It's really getting cold..."

"Oh, not much longer. In fact..." Maureen, from wherever she was, clicked her tongue and smiled to herself, quite pleased with her plan, just as Roger had been with his. "All done. Marky, this is going to work. I know it's going to."

"If you say so... it's worth a try, Maureen," the boy replied, his voice squeaking a bit in anticipation as he heard Maureen's footsteps approaching and felt her weight shift the mattress a bit.

There was something about sex that still made him incredibly uneasy. Sure, he could say the word without vomiting now, and he was certainly no longer a virgin, having had been with Maureen for a number of months, but he blushed every single time his beautiful lover got into bed with him and shied away at the initial contact, fearing nothing in particular but fretting something. Perhaps that was where his problem lay; maybe he just had a terrible case of nerves all of a sudden, or maybe he was afraid to do something wrong, to mess up or to embarrass himself. Not that this was much less embarrassing... But…no. No. There was nothing to worry about. Even if he didn't feel the usual sensations below the belt, there was nothing wrong. It was Maureen. He and Maureen were in bed again, and nothing bad was going to happen.

"Something the matter, Marky?"

"Oh... no, sorry--" he whispered, blushing terribly and grinning bashfully in the dark. "Everything's fine."

And as her fingers pressed down into his hair and he lost his own in her long curls, Mark really did believe that everything was going to be fine. While she kissed him, he began to believe that his little problem was going to correct itself, that they could go back to normal, that they would be happy again, without worry that there was something wrong with one of them, something the matter with their relationship. Maureen, as she gently took Mark's hands and led them where she wanted them to go- down her neck and chest, across her back- had him convinced that life was good again, and Mark couldn't help but smile as he continued to kiss her and she continued to lead. He heard Maureen giggle a bit when she brushed his trembling hands low across her stomach, and he himself blushed even deeper.

"Good?" she whispered, pulling back for just a moment and playing with Mark's wiry fingers.

"Good," he replied.

"Good." And with his consent, Maureen drew Mark's hands down even further, mentally ticking off the seconds until he would pull them away in shock.

She got to three.

For, as it had taken Mark a moment to register, Maureen had led his hands down and pressed them against something that, while not entirely unnatural to him, was quite unnatural for her and had _certainly_ not been there the last time they had tried to have sex. When the idea clicked, a very bewildered Mark gasped and slid away, pulling his hands close into him and staring wide-eyed at Maureen through the thick darkness.

"W-what is _t-that_?" he breathed, pulling his covers tightly around him and scooting as far away from Maureen as he could go. "I-is that a-a-"

"Marky," Maureen laughed, groping in the dark for his hands again, "Sweetie, that's my plan. Don't you get it, baby? There's more than one way to do this. This might be just what we need."

It was just around that time when Roger, who had kicked back on the couch downstairs, heard sounds of struggle from the rooms above; the swish of sheets, followed by a thud, followed not long thereafter by a terrible, gut-wrenching scream. Roger, wise as he was, recognized that sound; it was, unmistakably, the cry of a boy who had lost any and all dignity in one foul swoop. Or thrust.

* * *

**Author's Notes:** A…hem… So? 


End file.
